Today was supposed to be a big day, a day when I would finally finish that review article I had started 3 weeks ago (or was it 4 weeks ago?).
But all morning, I have been displaying classic symptoms of a person who wants to avoid work at all costs.
So to the article… where did I put it? Drat, I even had it lying right in front of me, a constant reminder of my procrastination. Clearly, I hadn’t lost it, despite my messy desk. My messy desk! May be I should just use 5 minutes of my best hour of the morning to straighten my desk out.
All papers sorted out, 55 minutes remaining of my best hour. Still plenty of time to get to that paper, see? Okay, but why in the world is that sticky note lying around? How long has it been, 3 weeks? Or has it been 4? Strangely, it has been fine for all that time, but now I’m 98% sure if I don’t throw it out immediately, this apparently-innocent-piece-of-paper would cause something catastrophic to happen; it is that important that I get up, walk to that dustbin, and throw it in the garbage.
Ah, I definitely had some experiments lined up for today. Are my glass slides fine, that I washed so carefully yesterday and put them safely away in my drawer? They should be, right? May be I should just go and check on them, the lab is, after all, just two doors away.
No, no. Today we were supposed to read in the morning, remember? No going anywhere. Even if something has happened to your glass slides, there’s nothing you can do about it now that you also cannot do 90 minutes later (Okay, it’s 90 minutes now? I certainly have higher expectations from myself).
But it’s like I have this itch in my hand, don’t you see? May be if I were to hold a forcep, or a petri dish in my hand, it’d just go away…
45 minutes to kill now before I can finally declare myself unfit for reading and use the excuse of too-less-time-remaining-for-the-rest-of-my-day-tasks.
But as time ticks by, and you haven’t yet gotten into the frenzy of your experimental procedures, and neither are you letting yourself get up from your seat for a said amount of time, and you have straightened out your desk, then what else do you have left to do… But to read?
And so I took out that hour for long-awaited, piling-up-to-dangerous-levels-now reading. Still didn’t finish that article, but I didn’t really expect myself to finish that today, did I?